We anticipate having a short downtime of a few minutes as we”ll need to restart our database server. As usual, we’re not certain when we will start the downtime, but we’ll keep people posted about our progress in IRC and on Twitter.

Once we’re done with the release we will post instructions on this blog on how to upgrade any replicated instances of MusicBrainz you might be running.

Tomorrow, Tuesday, 24 November, 2015 at 17:00 UTC, we will be bringing down rika, our sandbox server, to update the operating system. We expect this to take approximately two and a half hours, during which time rika will be updated to Ubuntu 14.04 LTS. If you are running any services (such as a MusicBrainz sandbox) on rika, remember to back up your data (like the MOTD says!), and be aware that you will need to restart these services once the server is available. Thank you for understanding the brief inconvenience as we put shiny new things in place.

UPDATE: Unfortunately, something has gone wrong during the update process. rika is responding to pings, but no services have come up. We will do our best to resolve this quickly, but there is currently no ETA.

Since we’re total slackers, we still haven’t set up our backup database server since it suffered a hardware failure. This means that we won’t be able to put the site into read-only mode and will require us to do a full downtime. Hopefully for our next schema change we’ll have tackled our backlog of sysadmin duties and will have a backup DB server to make the release easier.

Sorry for any trouble this may cause you.

P.S. Look for another blog post on Sunday for details on where to get your access tokens for the Live Data Feed.

This Friday we’re going to need to take a 15-20 minute downtime to fix a few leftover issues from our recent schema change. We tried to do this without downtime, but the service got progressively slower, so we’re electing to take some downtime.